Strategy Formulation

Action Plans Templates

In the Meetings chapter, I discussed three key steps in the strategic planning process:

• The Customer Benefit — study and assess your market
• pick your best opportunities that will sustain earnings
• share assets to align the firm

Strategic Action Plans support the last two steps of strategy formulation: you rehearse the action step, share responsibilities and communicating the plan. Action plans are the core tool for implementation and alignment, strategic or for that matter, for any plan.

This chapter shows the strategic planning team how to draft a Action Plan. As a strategic planning facilitator, I learned to keep action plan presentation simple — assume the decision maker will quickly grasp its essence.

Think of the action plans as the script for the strategy, where you block out the play, rehearse, make sure the cast gels as a team, and estimate the costs and benefits.

During your presentation you will use it like the play diagram for a football game. It has to be easy to explain and understand and confirm who is responsible for the work and when it will get done.

As you develop the action plans, you may have to go back and refine your strategy. Is it grounded in the reality of what we can do? This is the down in the details work.

In this chapter, I'll provide an action plan template, including the plan's benefits and costs. In the next chapter, I'll discuss how to combine all the action plans to estimate the Strategy's Value.